Читать книгу Butterfly - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 6

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Meanwhile Craig had gotten himself into irreproachable evening wear, and shaken himself into his big fur-lined coat, and set forth into forbidding darkness to drive the long miles between his home and his dinner. The Dwyers were enormously wealthy friends from New York, who had a country place near Philadelphia, where they occasionally gave winter house-parties, inviting—as Craig well knew—a decidedly mixed crowd of the younger social set, the older crowd, his own crowd, of visiting Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians, of writers, actors, dancers, and notabilities generally, and trusting, as Mrs. Dwyer amiably and stupidly phrased it, that “after dinner, you know, when we’ve all had something to drink, you know, things’ll kind of warm up!”

Amiability and stupidity were indeed the characteristics of his hostess to-night; although Nettie Dwyer had been a lean, uneducated, fiery little variety hall dancer thirty years ago. She had worn the coquettish tights and tipped sailor hats of the middle ’nineties’ vaudeville with entrancing grace. With their aid she had captured young Cyrus Bigelow Dwyer, III, a heavy-headed, supremely dull-looking youth whose thick full mouth was permanently half opened in a vacuous laugh.

Nettie had borne him children, had discovered her ancestors, had developed unsuspected deeps of snobbishness, and had put on some hundred and fifty pounds, in thirty years. Cyrus III could not approve of all her methods, but he considered her extremely brilliant. He thought their life of travel, of rushing and laughing and buying and shouting and eating and drinking, an infinite improvement upon the lives his mother and aunts lived in old brick houses in Washington Square. They all turned their noses up at Net, he said, but Net had more brains than the whole boiling!

Net was now an immensely stout woman with a red face under a beautifully dressed mahogany “transformation.” She had a deep, harsh, humorous voice, fat fingers loaded with rings, and an uproarious idea of what constituted a good time. Her three slender, smart, colourless girls considered “M’ma” to be what they described as “the official extension of the limit,” but under her insensitive guidance they lived unusually full lives. All three had married young; Dorothy, the middle and plainest girl, was the wife of a prosperous New York broker, and had a little boy. Cissy, the oldest, was divorced from some Chicagoan that nobody knew much about, and had artistic ambitions, puttered in sculptor’s clay, appeared in a moving picture with professionals, and posed in her beautiful city studio in a succession of startling gowns, smoking incessantly, carrying on flirtations with all sorts of disreputable or questionable men, and under all her ventures worrying incessantly over the horrible possibility of getting fat like M’ma.

Violet, the youngest daughter, who had been for three years Mrs. Reggy Vanderwort, had always been Craig’s favourite of the three. She was an extraordinarily thin, frail, polished little bit of humanity, with eyes that matched her name, with a self-confidence that nothing in life could shake, and with an unalterable and profound boredom as her chief characteristic. She had gone through the overwhelming ritual of a sensational society wedding as unmoved as the Vanderwort pearls themselves. Craig had watched her that day: the small, dark, sculptured head bowed under masses of virginal filmy veils, the tiny foot cased in its shining satin slipper; he had studied the bridesmaids, the fashionable crush, the reporters, the strains of music, the perfumes and softly heated air, the Bishop all fatherly solemnity, the slanting snowy lines of thousands of Easter lilies, and, outside, the crowd, in the spring sunshine of the Avenue.

How cool, how lovely and detached and sure of herself she had been beside poor Reggy, who, as usual, had had too much to drink, and beside her florid mother, of whom the same might be suspected! What a figure, in the social life of the city—the tea dances, the opera, the shops on the Avenue—little Mrs. Reggy with her cool little comments of “putrid” or “divine” had become!

Now there was already talk of trouble. Craig heard that she was staying with her mother and father for awhile. He devoutly hoped, as his motor lights at last picked up the pretentious house of stone, with its gargoyles and its Norman arches, that this was not so. She would be a great fool to throw over the Vanderwort millions, Reggy or no Reggy.

A gush of light poured from the immense doorway; men-servants met him. Across the dim luxuriousness of the enormous entrance hall he could see dim, spacious rooms, and far beyond them, what seemed a quarter of a mile away, the figures of beautifully dressed women and the black forms of men in evening dress circling in a bright pool of light. Craig, perfectly at home here, made his way toward them.

His hostess immediately detached herself from the group.

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes!” she said, with a sort of indulgent amazement, although she had expected him, and he knew it. “Imagine you coming all this way on a night like this!” And she introduced him to the distinguished-looking man to whom she was talking, “This is one of my boys, M’so’ Packarr—Mr. Craig Spaulding,” she said.

Craig, shaking hands with Monsieur Pacquard, felt a certain disloyal amusement stir within him. He had chanced never to meet Mrs. Dwyer until some three years ago; she and her children had been in Europe all the years that he was a child. As for his mother and his Spaulding cousins, they were very conscientiously ignorant of her existence.

Now he was introduced as “one of her boys.” No matter, he thought, turning to some of the others. They all swarmed eagerly about him. Several rounds of cocktails had been served, and quiet maids in caps and aprons were passing more, and the tiny slices of paste-smeared toast, cut into hearts and shields and diamonds and clover-leaves that accompanied the cocktails. Cyrus IV was there; the group about the enormous fireplace had been listening to his account of securing liquor straight through from a man in Montreal. Everybody had something to contribute to the fascinating topic.

“Poor Bill got nicely stung!” a young girl said, smiling.

“Gosh, my sixty-thousand-dollar vault ...” Bill growled. There was a general laugh. These persons were so well acquainted that it was rarely necessary for them to finish a sentence.

“Hear what happened to Joe?”

“Yes. Wasn’t that the limit?”

“Walt says that this feller Eisenbaum told him ...”

“Yes, I know. He was telling me!”

“Claret, huh?”

“Yes, and Walt said this Unger, whoever he is, got a lot of Baccardi.”

“Yep, so he said. Tell you what he paid for it, Roy?”

“Who, Walt?”

“Nope, this other feller.”

“He didn’t say.”

“We’ve got a lot of genuine absinthe,” said a beautiful woman of perhaps thirty-five, waving a flame-coloured fan. “Luckiest thing you ever heard of. George and I were having the most ghastly quarrel yesterday morning, and George slammed away from the breakfast table—most disgusting thing, what the servants think I don’t know——”

“It’s nothing to me if my wife makes a damn fool of herself,” said George himself, in a sort of sulky aside.

“George was tellin’ us at the Club about that absinthe,” a young man began. But Mrs. George continued the narrative. Craig, bored with nearly two years of the subject, turned toward the small and exquisitely dressed woman who had come to stand quietly beside him. Violet Vanderwort was beautiful to-night in a gown of moss-green velvet against whose smooth lines a great parrot, in blazing blues and oranges, had been embroidered. She wore sweeping parrot feathers in her hair, and her fan showed the same barbaric splendour. She was a pale woman, who dieted and massaged and steamed herself almost into anemia; all the Dwyer girls were afraid of getting fat.

“How’s Vi?” he asked, with a brother’s keen smile.

“Not any too buxom, Si!” she answered, using a phrase from a certain rather coarse story that had been going the rounds. “Reg tells me you won’t go to Nassau with us. Come and make love to me somewhere!”

“What, before dinner?”

She looked down, with an unchanged expression of boredom and dissatisfaction upon her face.

“You’re better at it after dinner?” she asked.

They had moved a little apart from the group, and were in the somewhat sheltered angle of a great, diamond-paned window embrasure. Craig smiled at the petulant, lovely face.

“You ought to know, Vi!” he reminded her briefly.

For answer she looked up with sudden animation and fire; she was always playing parts, thankful only to any one who gave her an opportunity.

“You never asked me, Craig!” she said, in a low voice.

“No, dear,” Craig said, after the correct pause. “And I never went over and asked the Princess Tatiana of Russia, either.”

“Ah, Craig, you’re nice!” Violet said, raising her eyes and smiling. And as a maid appeared with more cocktails she took one, and sipped it daintily, while Craig lighted his cigarette.

“Craig!” a dashing young matron challenged him, joining them suddenly, “tell me some naughty stories. You men are getting so stingy with them. Rose West told me one yesterday—I was telling Vi. Hear about—I oughtn’t to drink this, my husband will skin me—hear about the little boy and the airplane?”

Craig had heard it, but he had to listen to it again. “Bobby” Wendell, as this sprightly lady was called, had a reputation for shady stories, and for violent oaths at the card-table, as well. To him, who had carried into his unbelieving twenties a recollection of his church-going mother and aunts, her broad irreverences were shocking as well, but there was small piety in this particular group.

“Say, Craig,” she said, when Violet had left them alone, “don’t you think it is something awful the way people are talking about Vi and Reggy?”

Craig disliked the woman, and he disliked the custom, common in this society, of instantly plunging into intimate revelations regarding any person who chanced to leave a group. So it was with his least encouraging aspect that he said:

“I didn’t know they were.”

“Didn’t!” Mrs. Wendell echoed, animatedly and incredulously. “My dear, they say ...” She told him what they said.

“That’s nonsense!” Craig assured her, nettled and unconvinced.

Mrs. Wendell watched him shrewdly. She would have liked him to believe it, but if he preferred to take it this way, she could turn even this to account.

“Isn’t it too bad,” she said, eagerly. “Of course there’s not one word of truth in it! I was furious. I said to the people that told me, that everyone else in the world could talk about Vi, but that I thought it was utter nonsense. I’ll tell you what let’s do, Craig, you and I,” she added, suddenly. Craig was again conscious of his keen dislike and contempt for her. He hated these loud-mouthed married women who were always planning things for him, “just you and I.” “Let’s form ourselves into a little club,” suggested Bobby, “without saying one word to any one, and just stand up for Vi, and defend her, you know—that sort of thing. Shall we? She hasn’t much judgment herself, poor child—never did have. One of the most intimate friends that Reggy’s sister, Kate Pierson, has, told me that Reggy never would have married Vi, wasn’t any more in love with her than he was with dozens of other girls—why, Reggy Vanderwort and I danced our first German together——”

“Say, aren’t you folks going to eat?” said Mrs. Dwyer, hospitably, ponderously approaching. “Come on—you know there’s going to be a lot more in to dance. Don’t look so scared, Craig,” she added, laughing, “just about forty in all. The Butlers and some people they have for dinner, and the Saunderses. It’s a Hunt Dinner, you know, and I had the Misses Joseph come out from Philadelphia with a lot of favours,” Mrs. Dwyer continued, with her air of a benefactress who is about to be interrupted and praised; “it was nothing; just to please the youngsters!”

“Call me up and take me to lunch some day,” Bobby said, departing, “Oh, you can’t—you’re in Mount Holly. Well, maybe I’ll come down and spend the day with you some day soon. Do you think you could amuse me? Is there a place we could eat?”

“How’s your baby?” Craig asked. For a picture of young Mrs. Wendell and her beautiful child had been going the rounds of the fashionable magazines.

“Oh, he’s adorable. He’s with Grandma Wendell in Miami now,” his mother said, cheerfully. “They make an awful fuss about him. Call me up!”

The crowd, some twenty-four in all, had meanwhile moved into the dining room. Mrs. Dwyer drew Craig aside in the great hall.

“Look here!” she said, with a face of amusement and pride. She opened a doorway, and he looked into a spacious pantry now filled with long sticks upon which were large wooden horses’ heads plumed, bridled, and pennanted. Above them on a ladder a dignified young Jewish girl turned from the work of ranging great equine masks upon shelves. “Those are some of the favours, did you ever?” Mrs. Dwyer chuckled, admiringly. “The work we had to get them! The horses are all named for the real horses, you know. Well, it amuses the youngsters,” she added, resuming her deprecatory, benevolent manner. “Watch Cy, won’t you, Craig?” she added, in an aside. “Our regular bootlegger didn’t come round this week, and God knows what the boy has been drinking! Isn’t it terrible?”

Seated between Vi and a noisy eighteen-year-old named Harriet Hamilton, Craig felt a deep boredom seize him. Only the youngsters would dance later, and ride about on the wooden horses, and wear the masks. The older crowd would play bridge for ten cents a point; “keep it low and then we all can enjoy it,” Mrs. Dwyer would say. Bobby Wendell would become coarse; maids would pass liqueurs and whiskey and soda.

He had said, in accepting this invitation, that he was working hard, and might have to go home early. Now he decided to make his excuses, at any cost, immediately after dinner.